‘Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive’, thinks Stephen Dedalus in the role of part-time teacher in the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses, contemplating his graceless pupil Cyril Sargent as the boy wrestles with his arithmetic problems and wondering at the mutual bond summed up in the ambiguity (which survives translation) of the phrase ‘the love of a mother’ (U 2.165–6). Later in the day, during his rhapsodic lecture on Shakespeare to a select audience in the National Library, the whole phrase surfaces again in Stephen's mind (U 9.842–3).

Thanks to the same ambiguity of ‘of’, the title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, instead of designating a young man as he appears in a painting that is the work of his older self, might just refer to a painting by a youthful artist (a possibility not without critical consequences).

The title of Joyce's last book has, among its many meanings, a genitive that also works in two ways: the wake, or waking, of Finnegan may be that which he does as (reviving) subject or that which is done to him as (dead) object.